Thamires Lima, a research professor in chemical engineering at Drexel University, studies the properties of thick, viscous liquids — think honey or molasses, though in a lab you’re more likely to find polypropylene or crude oil. Using a method called extensional rheology, Lima stretches liquids between metal plates to find the force that makes them flow. A few years ago, she was conducting a… Source Thamires Lima, a research professor in chemical engineering at Drexel University, studie...

If you have ever registered at an online casino, sooner or later you have probably been asked to upload a copy of your ID or a recent bill. For many players this feels like an unnecessary hurdle, especially when all they want to do is start playing or withdraw their winnings. In reality, this step — known as KYC, or “Know Your Customer” — is a standard part of how licensed operators work, and it exists for good reasons. Understanding what it involves and why it is required ma...

Recent conflicts in Iran and Ukraine show that modern warfare does not wait for ideal communications, clear GPS signals, or manual replanning from a ground station. Modern strike systems must operate through jamming, degraded links, and changing target conditions while coordinating with ISR and relay assets in real time. To begin addressing this challenge, Shield AI and Destinus partnered to bring Hivemind mission autonomy software onto the Destinus Hornet platform, paving the way for integratio...

Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local LLMs for coding. She compares them using two standard tasks, and tries out the most promising model for day-to-day use. more… Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local LLMs for coding. She compares them using two standard tasks, and tries out the most promising model for day-to-day use. more… Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences t...

0.0 Context Setting It is Tuesday 7 July in Portland, Oregon, where we are totally not living through what could be described as William Gibson’s Jackpot. I mean, the minority senate leader might be in a persistent vegetative state and there’s like a non-zero chance there’s a bunch of techbros going around lobbying for him to become a McConneLLM and thus be uploaded for all eternity, and they’re probably fighting with another band of techbros who see him as the ideal candidate for a...

This is the first in an ongoing ad-hoc series of posts on Apache Kafka performance. I have no general direction, I’ll just share interesting insights based on the performance testing I do on Apache Kafka. Recently I was curious to see if there was any general performance improvement since Kafka 3.X. So I ran a suite of benchmarks with Dimster against 3.7.2 and 4.3.0. I saw two common patterns: Pattern 1: Low load benchmarks showed that end-to-end latency was higher with Kafka 4.3 compared t...

This project exists because I bought 30 sticks of 16GB DDR4-3200 RDIMM for an EPYC build in early April: an r/homelabsales find at $80 a stick, which was a fair price that day. The problem is that “that day” turned out to be the exact top of the market. Buying the top is pretty standard for me. Then the server wouldn’t POST with at least 4 of the sticks installed, and of the 16 that made it in, 4 more start throwing ECC errors the moment I do anything memory-heavy (LLM inferencing, which i...

The Star Spangled Banner by Percy Moran, via WorldHistory.org . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at households without homeowners insurance, crackdowns on AI chip smuggling, Japan’s two electrical frequencies, Meta’s AI compute business, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber! Housing Someone making the (somewhat dub...

The QuadRF (pictured above) a phased-array radio built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and an FPGA board with picosecond-level timing. It does advanced signal processing and beamforming. It can see WiFi through walls and track drones in flight. If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine what governments are capable of. When you plug a computer into a network, tools like Wireshark can show all the hidden traffic you might not even know is there. WiFi packe...

Did any of you play The Sims or The Sims 2? I can’t speak to the latter iterations of the game, but I did spend a not insignificant amount of my childhood designing and building houses. That worked out well in my family, because my sister was far more interested in designing the people who would end up living in the aforementioned dwellings. A neverending source of frustration was just how often something that looked better had lower stats. In particular, kitchen goods such as fridges that...

Breathe in. Breathe out. Standing in the fresh warm summer’s air, I found my breath slowing, and deepening. I wandered as I transitioned from the feeling of indoors to the Nature of outdoors. Trees and bushes and the light sounds of Nature accompany me as I put one foot forward in front of another. The fresh smell of Nature in the air permeates the air on the quiet country path. I hear a calm rustle in the leaves. A bird is quietly walking through the grass, in search of food. Families are ou...

I was down in Sesto a few days ago for Apparat ’s concert. The new album is great, attending the event with family and a few friends was a very enjoyable experience, and the atmosphere was very blue! That orange iPhone was quite something! Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Connect via email :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: I was down in Sesto a few days ago for Apparat ’s concert. The new album is great...

There have been several security incidents lately that involved compromising GitHub Actions workflows. This has led some to say " GitHub Actions is the weakest link " in publishing and to GitHub publishing a GitHub Actions security roadmap update . But saying it's an issue and acknowledging the fact is one thing, but you still need to do the mitigation work today so you are not going to be the next headline. So this post is going to outline 3 things to do so you can publish to PyPI securely w...

Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing it. If I don’t learn anything new while I’m writing, it’s not interesting enough to publish. Typically I learn way more than two things. For instance, in my o3 geoguessr post, I started out with the idea that most AI prompts probably don’t work, and I ended up learning that newer OpenAI models have lost o3’s ability to ge...

Welcome to a linked rundown of global developments in the exploration of our Moon across the first half of 2026. There’s also a section on global outlook because we must not forget our interconnectedness and collective action needs over sovereign interests. Each linked article below explains and contextualizes said development. As usual, I make a conscious effort to curate events and trends that actually happened instead of amplifying speculative coverage of upcoming events that may or may n...

I finally have time to flesh out ideas for lessons that I’ve wanted for years. However, if I can’t find a way to send them back to 2006, there’s no point writing them: very few people read long-form tutorials about software these days. I’d still be interested in comments, though—figuring out what I would teach always helps me learn. Overview Topic : Error handling. Audience : Senior undergraduates who are comfortable writing programs in Python and JavaScript that are hundred of l...

I recently bought a new Peugeot and the experience of getting setup on their online platform has been painful to say the least. Yesterday I picked up my shiny new (to me) Peugeot E-3008 GT. It's a beautiful car with lots of bells, whistles, and toys. I had my little MG EV for around 2.5 years, and it served me well, but I wanted something bigger, with more range. So I opted for the Peugeot. Anyway, since this is a modern car, it no longer comes with an owner's manual. Instead you need to i...

OpenAI's latest flagship model hit general availability this morning , and comes in three sizes: Luna, Terra, and Sol (from smallest to largest). The new models are priced per 1M input/output tokens as Luna $1/$6, Terra $2.50/$15, Sol $5/$30. For comparison, the Claude Opus series are $5/$25 and the Claude Fable 5 is $10/$50, but price-per-million tokens doesn't tell us much now that the number of reasoning tokens can differ so much between models for the same task. All three models have a...

Two editorials in the July issue of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery ask about the decay and future of the organization itself. Jim Larus, editor-in-chief of the CACM, writes  Wither ACM? Publish and Perish? ACM no longer has broad appeal as a professional organization, does not advance many members’ careers, and may not be a valuable affiliation in a more diverse technical world...It is time to recognize that ACM has shifted from functioning as a professional s...

Previously I opined that Valve was about to win the console generation . I couldn't have possibly predicted that both Microsoft and Sony would just self-sabotage so hard that they're both going to lose. Between Microsoft's decimation of the Xbox division , slaughtering off the IdTech team , and continued increases of Xbox hardware prices ; there's nothing to really be excited about with the Xbox. Sure their most recent presentation showed off a bunch of exclusives, but none of them...

Hard to believe, but it’s been over 9 months since the current crop of iPhones came out, and I elected to grab the (apparently not super popular ) iPhone Air, a new model of iPhone introduced for the first time. Rumor season for the new iPhones is in full swing, so it seemed like a good time to jot down my thoughts on the current model. Immediately, it’s really something to behold when you pick it up for the first time, it feels weirdly thin, pretty much everyone I’ve showed it to has...

I don't know much about dithering. But when I visit other people's sites and they dither their images in cool ways I always wonder how they do it. So in case anyone is wondering, here's my current method for dithering these pink images. Obligatory example image for when I undo this 2 months from now and no one knows wtf I am talking about: Edit: Almost like I know myself to well — the pictures now look like this instead: Which is covered in the post. Read more on the site...

I had another excellent PLDI this past June. It was my fourth 1 . I continued to meet new people and learn new things! Overall: I got to meet a lot of new people, which was exciting. I had some good chats about research. I asked a question at a talk! I got to show Aaron and Jacob PLDI and see them enjoy it. I missed hanging out with CF Bolz-Tereick and Chris Fallin, the usual suspects at conferences I attend. I’m looking forward to next year. This post is more about the conference than...